No Portal, No Modules

You cannot buy a portal's attention. You can buy a person's.

That sentence is the whole design brief for how I work, and to explain it, it helps to describe the thing most business programmes have become. There is a portal, and the portal has modules, and the modules were recorded last year, or the year before, for everyone and therefore for no one. There is a community, whose quiet structural job is to answer your questions so the founder does not have to. There is a curriculum, identical whether you sell software or sourdough, because a curriculum that adapted would not scale, and scale is the point. Each element exists to remove the seller's time from the product while keeping the price attached to the seller's reputation. The economics are excellent. For the seller.

For the buyer, the economics depend on a question almost nobody asks at the point of sale: what do I hold in my hands at the end, and does it still work when I stop paying?

Ask that question of the portal model and the answer is uncomfortable. What you hold is a login. What the login accesses is content that was never about your business, plus a community whose value evaporates with your subscription. The moment you stop paying, you hold nothing, which is not an accident of the design. It is the design.

A workshop with me is the opposite shape, and I find the honest inventory of what is missing to be the best description of it. There is no portal. There are no modules. There is no community to stay in, no tier to ascend to, no renewal to remember. What there is instead is a full day, or three, of a three-decade operator's complete attention on your business and on you, the strategy and the person running it worked on as one system, and at the end of it a written plan that you keep, act on, and measure against, with or without me. That is the whole product. It is the whole product on purpose, because everything I might have added would have diluted the only ingredient that matters, which is attention with judgement behind it.

I will make the fair concession: for learning a defined skill, a recorded course can be exactly right. But past £15k a month, your constraint is almost never missing information. It is the specific configuration of your business and how you run it, and no module recorded last year has ever seen either.

If a full day sounds like more than you need yet, start with the ten-minute version: the Entrepreneur Gap scan maps the eight roles your business needs covered and shows you what the day would actually work on. Free, and yours to keep, which is rather the theme.

Continue reading: Creatures of Context →

Or start with ten minutes: Take the free 10-minute Entrepreneur Gap scan →